I cite

Obscenity and assassination

"Justice was done," says Barak Obama.

Really? Should we agree? Should we cloak or shroud the assassination in justice, in the guise of law? Does the act warrant cover by the big Other of justice?

No. But I may be wrong and I'm not sure. Here's another attempt to think about what's at stake in the assassination of bin Laden.

The mass cheering after the death of bin Laden was obscene. It was a clear indication of the obscene supplement of the law, of an obscene enjoyment of violence and arbitrary power that accompanies law. The language of assassination attempts to highlight this obscene dimension by emphasizing the illegality of the murder of bin Laden.

In contrast, there is a language of justice. This language has tended to be religious and/or pre-modern, barbaric as it grounds itself in revenge.

Similar to this is a language of desert, as if it bin Laden clearly deserved to die and that this desert justifies the US assassination. I think it is possible that someone may deserve punishment and that this desert in no way entitles another to punish him. The desert of one is not the title or the cover or the justification of another. These are separate matters. (For example, if I know that my neighbor murdered her husband, I am not justified in killing her because she deserves to be punished.)

Additionally, there is the new information that there was a second team ready and waiting, a team that would assist in taking bin Laden alive, advising him legally, translating, etc. The fact of this team suggests the lawfulness of the Obama administration's actions. Similarly, the US didn't secretly target bin Laden. It's been known throughout the world for nearly 10 years that the US was seeking to "get bin Laden."

These "additions" suggest the cover of the big Other, the cover of law that lets us sleep easy or justify to ourselves what is done by the obscene, nightly law.

In my view (informed by Zizek), we err when we seek to cover these acts, these perhaps "necessary" acts, in justice--as if we were absolved, as if it were ok. There is no absolution, justification, excuse. The act remains wrong, culpable.

As Paul and I discussed this over dinner, he pointed out that bringing bin Laden to trial would have meant that evidence uncovered via torture would be admitted and that torture and extraordinary rendition would have come out in trial. My response: this is exactly why we cannot absolve, excuse, justify assassination. We cover our own crimes, as if they were not crimes, as if torture would permitted. Again, that bin Laden was wrong, that he directed and executed violent acts that resulted in the death of thousands of Americans does not make murdering him "just" (and the fact that we like it, that it feels good, that it is opportune, are inadequate justifications).

We on the Left are hypocrites if we condemn the Bush administration but accept the acts of the Obama administration.

There can and will be political violence. Some of us (in a very broad sense, perhaps including Bill Clinton and Barak Obama and George W. Bush and Osama bin Laden) will be the executors of this violence.

In the communist legacy, these executors of political violence have been Lenin, Stalin, Mao...there are others. But we err--we all err--in seeking coverage for this violence in the big Other of history, or justice.  Acts may be courageous, but this doesn't make them just.

Gandhi's alternative was non-violence. There is a vocal Left that shares this view. I don't. But at the same time, I think that we indulge ourselves in obscene enjoyment when we seek to protect murderous violence, opportune violence, when we try to avoid confronting this enjoyment and instead perversely make ourselved into instruments of a higher law.

The result: murderous violence occurs, but that doesn't make it just or right.

post-terrorism

Cheerleaders, chants, and beach balls are barbaric responses to the announcement of a political assassination.

Political assassination is not an act of justice. It does not bring about justice in some kind of cosmic tit for tat.  It is not the doing of justice. Justice is not done when another is killed in retaliation.

Retaliation, retribution, revenge--are these now the common terms through which justice is understood in the US? Do we think that victims are avenged when their assailant is killed? The victims are still dead, still gone, still mourned. Are they brought back in the acts of terror, torture, and imprisonment enacted in their name? Are they memorialized daily in airports as we take off our belts and shoes, as we put our hand behind are heads, spread-eagled, and searched, as we are x-rayed and scanned?

For a moment, the twenty minutes or so when the intertubes were alive with the news and before the president spoke, I felt something--something like relief, the sense of an end, perhaps even hope. It was, I think, the anticipation of an end to the disaster of the last ten years of ritualized humiliation, electronically stimulated fear, widespread surveillance, and the enjoyment of camps and torture.

The television media quickly made it clear that this sort of anticipation has no place: the war on terrorism is endless, total. It won't stop. We are not the same people. We have been reconfigured in a massive psycho-political experiment in transforming democracy into fascism, or a new barbarous variant of fascism, capitalist anarcho-fascism.

We are now the sort of people who cheer for death and murder, who repeat mindless lies, who glory in inequality--not bread and circuses but cheetos and reality tv. Everything is a game, yet we don't even recognize the levels on which it is played, the levels on which we aren't players at all but the targets captured or shot as the real players, hot shots, move on up.

Can we glimpse post-terrorism? Can we use it as an opening to something else, a focus not on war but on global capitalist exploitation? Can it be a chance to remake the decade's choice for barbarism into a new choice for socialism?

Bush, top cabinet officials monitored torture of detainees

Bush, top cabinet officials monitored torture of detainees.

By Tom Eley 23 April 2009

Former President George W. Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell and other top Bush administration officials had detailed knowledge of the Central Intelligence Agency’s torture tactics and approved them, according to a front-page article published Wednesday by the New York Times.

Also on Wednesday, the Senate Armed Services Committee released the results of its investigation into the treatment of alleged terrorists in military prisons. Among its major findings, the 231-page report confirms that CIA torture began months before the drafting of the recently released Bush Justice Department legal memos that sanctioned it.

This confirmed that the memos were nothing more than pseudo-legal rationalizations for illegal policies that were already being carried out. They were concocted in order to provide an ex post facto legal cover for CIA torturers and the government officials, from Bush on down, who gave the orders for their actions.

The same report provides evidence that the White House ordered the torturing of alleged terrorists in an attempt to extract statements linking Al Qaeda with then-Iraqi President Saddam Hussein. This fact establishes a direct connection between the violation of domestic and international laws barring torture, the preparation of an unprovoked war of aggression against Iraq, and a conspiracy by the president and his top officials to deceive the American people and drag them into war on the basis of lies. It underscores that the adoption of torture as a tool of foreign policy is part and parcel of a turn to dictatorial forms of rule and the assault on the democratic rights of the American people.

These latest revelations further demonstrate that the Bush White House was the headquarters of a militarist clique that operated with contempt for the Constitution and the law.

These are the very officials whom the Obama administration is seeking to shield from criminal investigation and prosecution.

The Times article and the Senate report signal a sharpening of the conflict within the state and the Obama administration itself over the torture policies carried out by both the CIA and the military under Bush. That conflict erupted into the open following Obama’s decision last Thursday to release four previously classified memos from the Bush Justice Department detailing various abusive interrogation tactics and vouching for their legality.

The new disclosures have made President Obama’s position untenable. He has repeatedly signaled that no high-ranking Bush administration officials and none of the CIA perpetrators are to be investigated. On Tuesday, he left open the possibility of a criminal investigation of the Bush Justice Department lawyers who drafted the torture memos and suggested that he might support a “bipartisan” and “non-political” commission of inquiry into the treatment of detainees, along the lines of the 9/11 Commission that oversaw an official cover-up of the events surrounding the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington.

The Senate report confirms that torture, including waterboarding, was already underway well before the first Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) “torture memo” was signed by then Assistant Attorney General for the OLC, Jay Bybee.

This undermines Obama and Attorney General Eric Holder’s argument that the CIA agents should not be investigated because they were following guidelines set down by the Justice Department.

The Obama administration has not even attempted to invent a legal pretext for not investigating the authors of the torture program, something it is obliged to do under international law. It has merely mouthed banalities about the need to “move forward” and “turn the page.”

Tattle tails

My first news of right wing whining about the Obama administration's release of the torture documents was last night's Daily Show's clips from Sunday morning shows. At first, I wasn't surprised. Since they can't make an ethical argument for the prosecution of those who authorized torture, they attack from a different position, one that actually repeats/relies on their Straussian underpinnings: the leaders must keep secrets from the people. This horrible burden of secrecy, of being will to do the dirty work when necessary while nonethless publicly espousing the law is the true burden of political responsibility. That the nightly law is obscene does not make it unnecessary.

As I thought about it, I recalled comments by students several years ago: the government doesn't have the right to tell us what it knows. These comments manifest the same logic of right wing rule. The compact between leaders and followers is you, leaders, keep us safe, and most of all keep us safe from the knowledge of what you have to do to keep us safe. In return, we will respect you and your awful burden, we will observe your commandments, most of all, your commandment that we enjoy (our bovine ignorance, our hatred of the enjoyment of others, our obsessive preoccupation with the very ethics that our obscene social compact stains).

But what about Obama? Has he chosen the worst, the option of knowledge without accountability: torture is now undeniable (for many of us, it's been undeniable since the Abu Ghraib photos; for some of us it's been undeniable as a basic fact of US militarism). He has put the country (and even the world in so far as others could arrest US officials traveling abroad) in the position of knowing that it's officials have tortured people, that it legalized some forms of torture, and that that's. It's in the past, we won't do it, in the future (or will we). So we have the knowledge of evil/jouissance/obscenity but no responsibility for it, no attempt to bring to justice.

Is this ethically responsible: we face up to evil in the world, our own evil, and accept moral ambiguity? So, such a move is a component of putting away childish things (like a hope for justice)?

Is it a move that says justice does not exist? There is no big Other capable of turning back the clock, of carrying out a necessary bringing to justice. So all we can do is persevere, carry on, look ahead? Resolution is old school--in the face of the decline of symbolic efficiency it won't work anyway (trials are a circus, overly politicized, truth commissions in the US have resolved nothing but produced sites for the flourishing of conspiracy theories).

Is it possible that the subjects who could prosecute the crimes have not yet been called into being and that this is the responsibility of the left? Sometimes it's necessary to dissolve the people and create a new one.

Poll: 44% of Democrats think Bush officials committed 'war crimes'

The Raw Story | Poll: 44% of Democrats think Bush officials committed 'war crimes'.

A new survey of Democratic voters has found 44 percent believe President Bush and members of his administration committed war crimes during their term, which ended Jan. 20.
...
Among the general populace, just 25 percent agree with the assessment that the Bush administration is guilty of war crimes. By contrast, 70 percent of Americans believe it would be "bad" should these officials be brought up on charges, including 53 percent of Democrats.

The poll was released Monday through Rasmussen.

Whether Americans believe it or not, the former President and Vice President have both admitted to approving torture -- or, as they call it, "enhanced interrogation tactics" -- in direct contravention to the Geneva Conventions.

"I supported it," said Vice President Cheney, regarding the practice known as "water-boarding," a form of simulated drowning. After World War II, Japanese soldiers were tried and convicted of war crimes for water-boarding, a practice which the outgoing Bush administration attempted to enshrine in policy.

"I was aware of the program, certainly, and involved in helping get the process cleared, as the agency in effect came in and wanted to know what they could and couldn't do," he said during a Dec. 2008 interview. "And they talked to me, as well as others, to explain what they wanted to do. And I supported it."

"My view is the techniques were necessary and are necessary," President Bush told Fox News with little more than a week to go in his administration.

Torturers Lie (go figure)

Link: Report Questions Pentagon Accounts - washingtonpost.com.

A Senate investigation has concluded that top Pentagon officials began assembling lists of harsh interrogation techniques in the summer of 2002 for use on detainees at Guantanamo Bay and that those officials later cited memos from field commanders to suggest that the proposals originated far down the chain of command, according to congressional sources briefed on the findings.

The sources said that memos and other evidence obtained during the inquiry show that officials in the office of then-Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld started to research the use of waterboarding, stress positions, sensory deprivation and other practices in July 2002, months before memos from commanders at the detention facility in Cuba requested permission to use those measures on suspected terrorists.

The reported evidence -- some of which is expected to be made public at a Senate hearing today -- also shows that military lawyers raised strong concerns about the legality of the practices as early as November 2002, a month before Rumsfeld approved them. The findings contradict previous accounts by top Bush administration appointees, setting the stage for new clashes between the White House and Congress over the origins of interrogation methods that many lawmakers regard as torture and possibly illegal.

A horrible list

1.   Climate change. I read the NYT magazine today. One of its reminders--that US gas mileage is pathetically worse than that in Japan and the EU. That the structure of our communities around driving is killing the environment. It may be that little nudge that pushes me to start a vegetable garden although I hate gardening. There are good reasons for this: I will be changing my practices, decreasing my carbon footprint, all that stuff. But I'm really doing it because I think that the society is so close to the abyss that I need some skills and some kind of provisions for the calamity to come.

2.    Economic collapse. With no Soviet Union to keep it in line, capitalism has accelerated and intensified unbearably. I can't get over the fact that 50 hedge fund managers (combined) made over 20 billion dollars this year. And that the numbers of workers making 20 dollars or more an hour has declined to levels below where they were in the seventies. The greed is mind-boggling. The 'oh well, there's nothing we can do' attitude is unbearable. There has been a massive counter-revolution in the US since the 70s, brought on by finance capital, its corporate allies, and conservatives in the wake of the unrest of the 60s (this was what makes Reagan so popular, the not quite human face of counter-revolution in the guise of greed is good and sex is bad). And the thing is, people have gone for it, swallowed what was screwing them whole. Cheap credit, tons of consumer goods, constant entertainment and socially acceptable prescription drugs. Who needs economic equality when we've got You Tube? We are all creative. We entertain each other and let the rich take more and the environment collapse.

3.   That the Bush administration will get away with torture (waging aggressive war, undertaking illegal surveillance). How could the NYT have ignored the White House torture story for more than a week and then only produce one editorial on it? The editorial was pathetic, saying things like we need more information and we won't get the information and using the Orwellian euphemisms for torture promulgated by the White House. Isn't it their job to dig up this information? Pelosi and the rest of the Democrats are pathetic, too weak and spineless (and I include both presidential candidates here) to call for resignations, press for indictments, and all the rest (maybe if folks had been giving each other blowjobs in the Oval we'd have a case...). The sickness will fester, continuing to kill the Constitution until it rots away completely (or is just the building blocks of children's toys Agamben evokes). Do we have anything to offer in its place?

Addition: Global food riots, shortages, and massive price increases, the flipside of American obesity (think corn syrup).

Shoppers are torturers

Link: What torture? We went shopping | Freep.com | Detroit Free Press.

Seven years ago, when the nation was attacked and Americans wanted to pitch in, wanted to help, wanted to sacrifice, our leaders told us to go shopping. Prop the economy up, they said. Don't worry about the war. Let us handle it. Go shopping.

And we did. Nor, scared as we were, eager for the illusion of security as we were, did we look too closely or examine too intently the things that were being done in our names. We became, many of us, expert at ignoring the screams from behind the curtain, discounting the growing mountain of evidence that things were not as we had been told, brushing off nagging questions about what we have become and how that does not square with what we are supposed to be.

We shopped, and did not fret overmuch about the price of our moral laxity.

Maybe that's because the price is paid in tiny increments of our national honor, yet somehow, never by those who most deserve to foot the bill. So that, seven years later, George W. Bush is still president of the United States, Donald Rumsfeld is working on his memoirs, John Yoo is a law professor at U.C. Berkeley.

But Lynndie England is a single mother, on parole and looking for work, living in a trailer with her folks.

And when will they be tried and executed for war crimes?

Link: Top Bush aides directed torture from the White House.

Senior Bush administration officials, including Vice President Dick Cheney and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, participated in White House meetings to discuss and approve specific methods of torture of detainees in the custody of US security forces, according to media reports.

These reports are a further confirmation that those at the highest levels of the US government bear direct responsibility for war crimes committed over the past several years under the cover of Washington’s “global war on terror.”

Citing unnamed sources, ABC News reported on Wednesday that the National Security Council’s Principals Committee met in 2002 and 2003 to review the interrogation of several alleged Al Qaeda members held by the CIA.

ABC reported, “The high-level discussions about these ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ were so detailed, these sources said, some of these interrogation sessions were almost choreographed—down to the number of times CIA agents could use a specific tactic.” Among the “enhanced interrogation techniques”—a euphemism for torture—was waterboarding, a notorious method that involves the near drowning of the prisoner.

The Principals Committee at that time was chaired by then-National Security Advisor Condoleezza Rice. It included Cheney, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell, CIA Director George Tenet, and Attorney General John Ashcroft.

According to ABC, the discussions began after the capture of Abu Zubaydah in the spring of 2002. Earlier this year, the Bush administration officially acknowledged that the CIA had used waterboarding on Zubaydah, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri.

....

In any case, the officials were involved in planning torture down to the intricate details, indicating an almost sadistic interest. According to an AP article published Friday, “At times, CIA officers would demonstrate some of the tactics, or at least detail how they worked, to make sure the small group of ‘principals’ fully understood what the al-Qaida detainees would undergo.”

ABC News reported that the CIA asked repeatedly for approval of specific interrogation plans. “Sources said that at each discussion, all the Principals present approved.”

Several measures taken by administration officials make it apparent that they were acutely aware that what they were approving violated international and domestic law. All of those participating could be subject to war crimes prosecution, in the US or in other countries.

The AP reports, “The officials also took care to insulate President Bush” from the meetings. That is, there was an attempt to give the president plausible deniability in the event that the discussions were made public.

Nonetheless, Bush defended the meetings and the torture decisions in an interview with ABC News Friday. “Well, we started to connect the dots, in order to protect the American people,” he told ABC News White House correspondent Martha Raddatz. “And, yes, I’m aware our national security team met on this issue. And I approved.”

The meetings coincided with the drafting of at least two memoranda designed to give a legal fig leaf for torture, one dated August 2002 and another March 2003. The memos argued for unconstrained power of the president to authorize torture and commit other illegal acts, citing the “war on terror” as justification.

A former senior US intelligence official familiar with the meetings told the AP, “If you looked at the timing of the meetings and the memos you’d see a correlation.” Those attending the meetings wanted “a legal opinion on the legality of these tactics” before proceeding. That is, the Bush administration decided it wanted to use torture, and commissioned the drafting of a pseudo-legal justification for this decision, one designed to protect both the administration officials and the CIA agents who carried out the torture.

In 2004, the Justice Department formally withdrew the memoranda on torture, but the administration never repudiated the legal arguments contained in them. Indeed, a future memo on interrogation upheld the content of the previous memos.

Those involved in drafting the memos included John Yoo, a lawyer at the Justice Department; David Addington, Cheney’s legal counsel; and Alberto Gonzales, then-White House Counsel.

The hands-on involvement of the White House in organizing torture also made some of the principals nervous, including Ashcroft. According to an official cited by ABC News, Ashcroft asked at one meeting, “Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly.” ABC said that Ashcroft supported the general interrogation program by the CIA, but thought it unseemly for the White House to micromanage the techniques employed.

There is no doubt that the use of torture has continued to this day. ABC reported that after the CIA captured another suspect in the summer of 2004, the agency went back to the administration for approval of the torture techniques. “Then-National Security Advisor Rice, sources said, was decisive. Despite growing policy concerns—shared by Powell—that the program was harming the image of the United States abroad, sources say she did not back down, telling the CIA, ‘This is your baby. Go do it!’”

These revelations are further confirmation that the crimes at Abu Ghraib and other instances of torture were not the actions of rogue individuals, but were planned and ordered by the White House.

Speaking to the WSWS, Francis Boyle, a professor of international law and human rights at the University of Illinois, said, “Clearly this was criminal activity at the time they committed it. At the very least, it violated the Geneva Conventions, the Convention Against Torture, the War Crimes Act, and the federal anti-torture statutes. Clearly these would be impeachable offenses.”

Boyle, who has campaigned for the impeachment and prosecution of administration officials, said that with the recent revelations, Rice should be added to the list of top officials guilty of war crimes.

Asked why there have been no moves for impeachment, Boyle noted, “The Democrats have been complicit in pretty much everything the administration has done since September 11. They have continued to fund the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan since they assumed control of Congress in January 2007. It doesn’t surprise me that they don’t oppose torture.”

The fact that the leading figures of the United States government were involved in detailed discussions of torture methods is an indictment not only of the Bush administration, but of the entire political system in the US. From the beginning, the Democrats have given the White House a green light to carry out such policies without constraint.

Top Congressional Democrats, including the current Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, were briefed as early as 2002 on the CIA’s program and were given a presentation on the methods the agency was using. Others were aware of the existence and destruction of the videotapes depicting torture.

There can be no doubt that the Democratic Party leadership was fully aware that the CIA has been using torture techniques and that the administration approved it. Nothing has been done to halt these practices, however, or to inform the American people of the actions of the government. In 2006, Democrats helped pass the Military Commissions Act, which amended the War Crimes Act so as to provide greater cover for administration officials.

The question of torture has not been made an issue in the current presidential elections. Neither of the Democratic Party candidates, Senators Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, has made statements on the recent revelations or the release last week of one of the memos justifying torture.

War criminals' rights are human rights

A former student came over last night for a glass wine. She finished law school and passed the bar about a year ago. While at law school, she did an internship in country X.

Her advisor had asked about her interests and she had mentioned human rights law. He said that was great and sent her to the country. She did 2 weeks of 80 hour a week intensive language training (since she was fluent in a related language, this is not quite as crazy as it sounds). Then she was to start work. A contact at the office where she was interning said that they would send a car for her (although the address seemed easily reachable by public transportation). She was taken to an imposing building with a marble interior, marble columns, floor, stairwells.

The initial encounter was a bit confusing.

Then she realized she was working for the defense.

The defense of the former head of the secret police.

That's what justice requires.